Grow Your Own

After four years, Grow Your Own has come to an end. We are so thankful for all the people who supported the event.

[Updated August 17, 2011.]

What’s Grow Your Own?

Grow Your Own is a blogging event that celebrates the foods we grow or raise ourselves and the dishes we make using our homegrown products. Anyone with a blog can participate! Do you write a food blog? A gardening blog? A farm blog? A hunting or foraging blog? An eco blog? A frugal blog? Anything whatsoever related to home and garden or fun activities to do with children? You can write a post about some of the edibles you have raised, grown, or found and cooked with. Having a food blog is not a requirement for participation.

Rules (They are really simple, I promise.)

Make a dish that uses at least one item from your very own garden or farm and post about it. Your garden doesn’t have to be big, container gardens are welcome! If you hunted or foraged, those items are also eligible. You can also use something that was given to you, but the giver must have personally grown or raised the item. If you paid for it, then it doesn’t count.

Anything edible that you have grown or raised qualifies, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, sprouts, edible flowers, nuts, grains, legumes, dairy products, eggs, livestock, fish, and anything else I might have forgotten. Produce from both indoor and outdoor gardens are welcome, as well as dishes that use foods you have preserved by freezing, canning, or drying. Different regions will have different things available, so feel free to feature things unique to your area. (Rambutan trees, anyone?) We like to celebrate variety!

Please make sure your dish is posted during the month of the event. One post per blog, please.

As a courtesy, please include a link to this announcement in your blog post, and then update later with a link to the round-up.

If you want to include one of the Grow Your Own badges in your post, feel free to grab one from below. (Please upload to your own server/image repository.) Logos professionally designed by Jeff Meyers.

I Want to Participate!

To include your post in the round-up, send an email to the host by the last day of each month with the following information:

Subject line: Grow Your Own #

Your name and location (country, state if applicable)

Your blog URL

Permalink to your post

300×300 pixel photo of your dish (As long as the photo is no larger than 300 pixels in either direction, it will work.)

The host will post a round-up of all our dishes within a few days after the deadline, of course subject to any other events in life, acts of God, etc. To find out who’s hosting each round, visit the Grow Your Own Hosting page.

For an event like this it’s useful and interesting to see what is fresh and available from different regions, so please make sure you include the location information when you submit your entry.

It’s hard to keep track of posts if we don’t receive an email, so please remember to email your information to your host. We feel bad if we miss your post!

I Want to Host Grow Your Own!

If you would like to host, please send an email to andreasrecipesgyo AT gmail DOT com. To be considered for hosting, you must participate in the event at least one time prior.

Great! Just in time, I have made something last weekend, I used the grown herbs in our tiny garden.. I haven’t posted it yet, but I will do it later. I’m thrilled to join GYO for the first time since I’m back to blogging… been in hiatus for say.. a year or so.. he he.. Cheers! Got nice blog in here. I’ll link you to mine.

Hi! We’re so happy we found your site! We absolutely love this event and want to participate! Our garden is our inspiration and feeding ground. We’ve made two dishes this week using our garden delights and would love to share these with your event! We tried e-mailing you, but somehow it doesn’t work. Could you let us know how submit our recipes ?

How fun to find your site! I’m an avid food grower/food eater, and look forward to posting on GYO, as soon as I figure out the technical details of how to do that….Thanks so much for a wonderful forum!

Hey Andrea, love your blog and this is such a cool idea. I’d like to feature it on my blog too if that’s OK – it’s really in line with what I’m doing (I’m trying to eat seasonally for a year – doing pretty good so far, and managing to grow at least a little of my own food too. It’s at http://www.theyearofeatingseasonally.wordpress.com if you’re interested).

Keep up the good work, I’ll look forward to seeing who wins this month’s competition!

Hi there Andrea,
I just signed up for the flickr pool and am getting all excited about Grow Your Own. We live in SW Florida and have a city lot that is covered in veggie gardens and fruit trees. We eat from our land at least once a week.
I’d love to share pictures of some of our goodies!

It’s us again. Now it’s time for us to participate. Geez, we’ve been so torn between recipes. Is it one recipe submission per blog? We can’t decide which dish to submit for the month. Help !! Maybe that’s why we didn’t send anything in for February 2007.

Glad you can join in this month! I also have trouble choosing just one post each time. You can put links in your post to other things you made that month that fit the theme so your readers can find those easily, though in your case I think that would be all of your posts! 🙂

Hi there, I would be interested in participating in the GYO. I live in Canada but keep a fair weather veg & herb garden and grow herbs indoors as well. This year I am going to attempt preserving so will hopefully have homegrown dried, frozen & jarred items to play with in the cold seasons. However, I am not a blogger. Is it possible for non-bloggers to join in the fun? And if so, how?

Hi Andrea, disregard the last post about non-bloggers joining. I have decided to stop asking how non-bloggers can play along with blogging challenges and start up my own blog. I am very excited about participating as many of the herbs are up and ready for action!

Hi Andrea,
I love your GYO segment and I was wondering whether I could participate 8/30/08( Am I too late?) My husband is actually the one who is the gardener and I am the cook. I love going to the garden and sow whatever my husband has reaped. However, we have such a short growing season and then I am going to have to rely on the market again and with this said, I received a very disturbing e-mail from someone telling me that the FDA is going to irradiate our fruits and veggies effective immediately, this will destroy all the phytochemicals and render them almost “fruitless” no pun intended. May I forward this e-mail to you?
Thank you.

Hi Nazarina! Yes, you have plenty of time to participate in the 1st Anniversary event! Entries are due on Aug 30, so you can post your dish this week. Make sure you send me an email per the directions above so I can include you in the round-up.

What a great way to share the numerous ways people get food to the table the old fashioned way. A friend of mine mentioned this post and I love your ideas! Will definitely checkout the Flickr photo group.

Hi, I’m from the UK and found your site while looking for information of permaculture, I have a vegetable garden which is organic and use all we grow in one form or another. At the moment we are just coming out of winter and so all I have left is leeks, landcress and jerusalem artichokes. The land cress has been a fabulous success and I will be putting up a recipe for land cress soup tomorrow. I really enjoyed reading through the posts and embrace the culture of sharing. Thanks.

Hi Andrea, I’m so glad I came across this event! I just finished my first (hopefully of many) GYO posts. I’m not familiar with the term meta data… I tagged my post with the Grow Your Own and GYO as you suggested (just using the tagging function in Blogger), is that what meta data refers to? Thanks!

Hi Vincent. You can right click on the badge you want to save it, then upload to your server and link to it with some simple code:
< img src="http://www.yourservername.com/badgename"/ >
Remove the space before img.

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